The City Builder

George Konrád

The narrator of The City Builder, or perhaps more accurately its
observer or imaginer, is the city planner in an unnamed Eastern European
provincial city, who has clung to his humanity as he climbed the ranks
of bureaucracy.

The City Builder moves around in time and space, but individual
sections have a thematic focus and structure as stories or parables.
There is no narrative progression, with drive provided instead by the
sheer power of the language, which approaches poetry and includes long
passages where every sentence is an aphorism. It is the narrator who
provides continuity, though he is given substance only through his
memories and his perspectives on the people and the world around him.

He wakes in the morning and recalls his wife and her death. He describes
the city, its industrialization, and a flood. He looks back at his
childhood and family, events of war and genocide, and the birth of
his son. He ruminates on his rise to power as a planner. He engages
in a dialogue with God, presenting Moses and Christ as alternative kinds
of planners.

"I was a city planner in the early phase of socialism.
From bourgeois I became a member of the intelligentsia, and
was servant of law and order, agent of an open future, wizard of
upward-soaring graphs, and self-hating hawker in an ideology shop,
all in one. My father was a private planner, I was a planner
employed by the state. To make decisions about others he needed
money, I have my office. What makes others envy me, what enables
me to imagine in arrogant moments that I am what I am, are wealth
and power, and of these we both had more than our share."

He revives memories of wartime espionage and of conflicts with his son.
He remembers the death and funeral of his father. He describes meeting
his wife on a cruise. He envisages an earthquake and a torture chamber.
And he views a New Year's Eve celebration.

"You must live for the holiday; tonight boredom is a capital
offense. Destroy the silent night, reclaim the world with joy,
banish routine; if you waste this hour, tomorrow will not back
you up. A crazy year is over; what have you done all this time?
Where are the circled dates on your calendar? It is up to you
to pry open locked minutes, to tremble with the stage fright of
freedom, to look at horrible window displays in utter bafflement.
You sit in each other's silence; you think you know all there is
to know about the other person, but that voiceless explosion with
which the soul cuts loose from its mooring and becomes a white
arrow in the sky, you dare mention only with a hesitant smile.
Humiliate yourself; make your face burn more intensely than
a riverbank on the morning of the longest day of the year.
Let this face be your gift to yourself — live, don't snuff out
your senses. Tomorrow you may hang yourself; or you may emigrate
from your passport picture into an equatorial-polar denial of that
excessively narrow and moderate zone where you have been fretting
up to now. Keep walking until you clutch a fence post and slowly
sink on your knees; or remain immobile until unclasping your hands
will seem like a miracle. You are terrified; they can still touch
you and tell you things you do not dare hear. Defy them all and
say the word that takes your breath away; daub your face, your
house, your world with the images of your terror, carve your ideas
on tree trunks, your freedom on blocks of ice. Don't build new
wings for your prisons, don't burn live offerings before the false
gods of resignation; instead, enrich your moments in the quick
oven of existence, let its light penetrate your lunar nerves.
No reward or recognition can make you become your own friend;
no one can surpass you in your thirst for defeat. Do not be
modest, drink to every life in this city that you made yours.
Your technique was childish, your self-justification inadequate,
your achievements pathetic. But save, save what you can; your
misfortunes are not sewed under your skin — this celebration is
fast becoming a revolution. Stop bartering and manipulating; stop
brooding over your troubles; say no lovingly to your inquisitors;
stretch out on the body of time, and in the midst of erupting
seconds, air your room, change your bed sheets, listen to the
bells, and say your cruel goodbyes."

The City Builder was originally published in 1977. This edition has an
introduction by Carlos Fuentes written in 1987, which now seems dated.
It also emphasizes Konrád's work as an essayist and intellectual rather
than as a novelist. I would recommend reading The City Builder first
and then considering the introduction.